


flights of bodhi

by emmram



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Study, Gen, PTSD, non-linear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 05:05:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9641870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmram/pseuds/emmram
Summary: most days he’s learned to live with it; he does for the rebellion now what he did for the empire and tries not to think too hard about what that means. other times he tries—and fails—to swallow the screams echoing through all the empty spaces in his head.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: SPOILERS for the movie. hints of anxiety, ptsd, permanent brain damage. unabashedly bodhi-centric. (also for those of you who know tamil: the title is a horrible pun and i’m… not really sorry.)

**flights of bodhi**

the air outside the base on yavin 4 is hot and sticks in bodhi’s throat; he usually returns with lights flashing on the back of his eyelids and a pounding headache if he goes outside for more than a few hours. in that time he imagines that the sweat pooling at his neck and dripping down his chest is the sap of ( _the succulent that he and his friends used to cut open, its taste tangy and burning and forbidden_ ) and sand between his fingers, flowing, soft like silk yet blistering beneath his fingernails. if he squints just right, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun, he can even see the silhouettes of ( _old temples, stark conical structures against the pale blue sky_ ) in the ziggurats.

for all that his body screams at him later, it’s almost… meditative. it’s a welcome reprieve from the controlled chaos within the base, where every second look, every over-loud greeting, every dropped hydrospanner, grates against his overstretched nerves. it’s not quite that he’s treated with suspicion or that he has reasons to fear the alliance—he’s met several other imperial defectors, soldiers and starfighter pilots mostly, and he’s treated with some respect and maybe even camaraderie—but because in a way it _reminds_ him of the empire. not in specifics, obviously: the alliance can never achieve the near-geometric perfection of imperial operations, their precision, their unchanging uniformity, and the years of rote training that it took to achieve that. but something about the vast stretches of chrome and blinding durasteel, the sounds of ships being repaired or readied for flight, the preponderance of pale-skinned humanoids, the endless cycle of missions and briefings and downtime punctuated by games of sabacc and too-loud, too-cheerful drinking songs and jolts of panic and grief, reminds him too much of the life he had supposedly left behind, and—

—and sometimes the familiarity pulls at his nerves, plays them like ( _the long-stringed instrument his mother used to play with oiled fingertips, the notes just this side of jarring_ ), and he can’t breathe, can’t explain why to the people who are worried even though he _wants_ to—

he steps outside then, and yavin 4 is both nothing and everything like jedha and he stands there in between the sap and the sand and the temples and the swell of pain behind his eyes and hums an old prayer that he can’t quite remember.

-

( _the jump to hyperspace after scarif is poorly calculated and poorly done and it’s only by sheer luck and what chirrut insists on calling the force that they are not vapourised instantly. cassian and chirrut look moments away from death and jyn and baze can’t tear themselves away from their side and bodhi—bodhi has a corpse in the co-pilot seat, blood dripping from his head and nose and ears, a death grip on the controls and mind grasping at protocols and co-ordinates that he should know—that he **should** know!—and coming up with scraps of sensation instead, durasteel under his fingers and salt on his lips and the terrifying, surreal feeling of being lost in a cavern that’s lost in a bubble that’s lost in space—_)

-

bodhi’s pretty sure that he had one brother and one sister, both elder to him, but he was always so surrounded by cousins, and cousins of cousins, that those kind of distinctions never really mattered. he grew up on the laps of multiple mothers, on the shoulders of fathers and uncles and unruly _annas_ who would sneak him into sandspeeder rides despite his protests. he would fight with his cousins over ( _fluffy white seedcake that would stick between his teeth in webs and explode with spice on his tongue_ ) and eating the last bite of the last dish because one of his older brothers ( _whose smile was always crooked thanks to a twice broken jaw_ ) **swore** that that bite would bring the person eating it all kinds of luck. (it’s a silly superstition—and one, on retrospect, that got them to clean up their plates without a lot of scolding or effort—but bodhi often found himself waiting for the last morsel at the academy, tossing a pleased smile at no one in particular.)

he didn’t have—or need—words to distinguish between all these people who filled his life until they started teaching basic at school. it didn’t take long for petty fights to fester into resentment, or for competitions for affection to end in fractured relationships, all of them drifting apart long before the empire permanently broke their world.

and yet—

on the day bodhi left for the imperial academy to train, more excited for his first trip on a spaceship than anything else, the cousin with the twice-broken jaw came to him and pressed a box of ( _rolled sweets where sugar was stretched like paper around buttered fruits_ ) into his hands and told him: _i’ve saved the last of these for you_. bodhi never said thanks, but he made those sweets last for as long as he could. that was the last time he’d had jedhaen food, the last time he’d had anything outside of freeze-dried rations that tasted like regurgitated bantha feed (and was probably regurgitated bantha feed).

somebody manages to find somebody else on yavin 4 who knows to make jedhaen dishes, even in the midst of chaos and calamity and, well, _rebellion_ , and bodhi is too touched to refuse when he is presented with the seedcake he remembers from childhood. he has long grown unused to its spices and so he spends the rest of the daily cycle curled up in his quarters, sweating, folding and unfolding his legs as his stomach cramps. the dish wasn’t _right_ , though, and he wishes he could explain exactly what _should_ go into it and how and why, but he doesn’t even remember its name, and the best he can hope for now is that he doesn’t vomit out the last morsel.

-

( _he doesn’t and will never remember how he landed at the base—how did they make out his garbled call sign? how did he locate the hangar when everything is so jumbled in his head?—but he’s there when they have to peel him out of the pilot’s seat, there when bacta is slapped over open burns so deep he can’t feel the pain, there when the pain of regrowing nerves makes him scream, there when jyn clutches his hand and hums something that reminds him of galen so violently that he leans and manages to vomit on her shoes. he’s there when chirrut has a hand over his shaved head, murmuring a prayer-that’s-not-really-a-prayer, and there when cassian talks haltingly, painfully, about how the death star plans they’d nearly died retrieving were missing._

 _he’s there, and he tries to stay, but sometimes—_ )

-

bodhi remembers how excited he was to join the imperial academy, back before they’d started forcibly conscripting citizens, before mining ruthlessly for kyber, before they’d drained jedha of life and promise and then swatted it aside like so much scrap metal. the man who would declare himself emperor had been elected their leader in a planet so far away it might not exist at all—after all, without (tightly-regulated) hyperspace lanes and holonet, the idea that the galaxy entire could exist at one time, all together, is just ridiculous. bodhi and ( _the cousin with hair twisted into intricate braids and studded with ornaments that moved like a constellation every time she turned to laugh at him_ ) would spend hours at the observatory looking at distant nebulae in turn and wonder if _this_ is what _this_ system had looked like to the colonisers who had arrived there thousands and thousands of standard years ago. _we’re looking into a time-machine_ , she’d say.

when the empire first came for them, it seemed to bodhi like an opportunity to leave the time-machine and— _live_ the galaxy as it lived, impossible and exhilarating all at once. he was far from the only one to sign up to work for the empire in that initial wave, but he would be one among the few survivors who would witness this outreach turn into outright occupation.

nothing could dampen his enthusiasm in the beginning—even the impersonal chrome and durasteel, the uniformity, the discipline, the geometry and sheer edges of everything that the empire built seemed like an exhilarating change from the heat and controlled chaos of home. bodhi quickly developed a reputation for both being a great student and a bit of a troublemaker; he’d get into frequent fights with his classmates, usually, at first, in defence of himself and where he’d come from, and then eventually, in defence of others.

( _sharp_ , it had said on his report. _quick to anger when provoked._ )

after his initial training he signed up to pilot a starfighter—and, for a while, it seemed like he would have no problems getting his own ship. he had a gift for mechanics, good reflexes, and absolutely no idea whom he was going to fight, after all.

the first time he got into a sim for a test run, however—

he failed. miserably.

the thing is, bodhi had no idea what to do with his guns. training them on targets and firing them and watching them disappear in short-lived clouds of superheated gas felt as profoundly remote and, and _weird_ as looking through their time-machine back home at things that didn’t exist anymore. the first time he was indiscriminate, shooting down enemy and friend alike before his instructor bodily pulled him out of the sim, eyes flashing, and screaming, as though for the fourth or fifth time, _what are you doing?!_

it didn’t get any better on his next try, or the one after that, or the one after _that_. he could fly his way through a keyhole but combat situations either had him completely paralysed or completely out of control. he hated himself for the dissonance, almost as much as his instructors hated it and tried to train it out of him, but after two years of training that felt like he’d been whittled down into the shape of a pilot than actually become one, they swat him aside much like they would jedha a few years down the line.

hauling cargo across the galaxy, he told himself, was about as close as he was going to get to his first dream of living the galaxy entire, after all. it wasn’t the worst thing. it was what he wanted.

and if it soon started feeling like banishment, then it was nothing less than he deserved.

-

( _bodhi’s doctor is fresh out of training and it’s probably the only reason she spends as much time with him as she does; he gets the sense that he’s desperately lucky to have survived for this long, and he can understand her anxiety about having her most difficult project fall apart the moment she dares to look away. she talks to him when he’s aware enough for it—tells him about the bacta that’s covering a good portion of his body, how millions of little creatures are becoming a part of him by appropriating his genetic material and regenerating the parts of him that’d burned away. she stumbles through her explanations of his scans—she’s twi’lek, and never quite comfortable with humanoid anatomy—but he understands enough to know that he will never be what he was._

 _it’s a familiar thing, that knowledge._ )

-

saw gerrera’s monster appeared crude, but what it did in bodhi’s brain couldn’t be replicated by the most skilled surgeons. it plucked at his neural circuits like an instrument, testing the ones that were laid out over decades of use and repetition and breaking the newer, fragile connections. memories come in different kinds, and not a single one of them exists discretely: humanoids use everything from emotion to the colour of the sky to recall something as simple as their own name.

for bodhi, bor gullet burned off most of his ways to access the things he knows—he can remember how a flower smelt or looked or felt in his hands but he can never quite remember its name; he can recall with frightening clarity the way a classmate at the academy made his heart flutter but never quite remember his face or the sound of his voice. he can now listen to a lecture for hours and yet not recall a single specific: he can no longer hold onto new facts than he can to thin air.

most days he’s learned to live with it; he does for the rebellion now what he did for the empire and tries not to think too hard about what that means. other times he tries—and fails—to swallow the screams echoing through all the empty spaces in his head; other times the word _galen_ pops up in his thoughts without warning and he stumbles where he stands, his chest hollowed out by grief and guilt and he can’t remember why or how because that memory was too new, that memory was what that monster _wanted_ —

(—except he hadn’t been home in so long and he was sorry, he was _so sorry_ —)

he usually ends up in chirrut and baze’s quarters then—whether of his own volition or not he can never quite remember—and it’s both comforting and distressing because they’re home and they’re _not_ , really. the guardians were legends themselves, in a way far more jarring than the jedi who lived in the time-machine in the sky, and bodhi had been terrified simply because he’d been told to be terrified, and because he’d then been told to be distrustful. it’s hard to let go of all of that, but sometimes baze would have a hand on his chest to slow down his panicked breathing and chirrut would hum something that feels familiar while all the words would sound foreign, and bodhi would—

bodhi would—

-

( _between the time he set off with galen’s message and he steps out of the medbay on yavin 4, four planets have died. everyone’s celebrating the death of the last one, even as he stares at the viewing screens, numb and a little nauseous._ we couldn’t have done it without you _, somebody tells him—they look familiar—and he wants to scream but he huddles in cassian’s borrowed jacket and thinks of his cousin with the stars in her hair laughing like the future didn’t matter and lets himself cry. just a little._ ) 


End file.
